NFR Wins Los Alamos Networking Contract

By Nick Wakeman, Staff Writer


AUG. 18 ? The Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico has awarded a cooperative research and development agreement grant to National Flight Record Inc. of Rockville, Md., to develop high-speed network monitoring technology.


NFR develops intrusion detection, network traffic and network analysis tools. The grant would merge the capabilities of NFR software with the skills of the Los Alamos lab to produce an architecture to address network security needs for the lab and related Energy Department facilities.


"Protection of information systems has become a national priority, as we have come to rely more on digital information to perform the vital functions of government and U.S. industry," said Terry Hawkins, director of the Nonproliferation and International Security Division at Los Alamos. "Because of the enormity of the information flow, protecting it has become almost humanly impossible. Therefore, we must employ technical solutions to most fully protect vital information channels."


"The effective monitoring of networks has become a major priority for most organizations as the dependency on network-based computing has soared," said Jack Reis, NFR's chief executive. "As networks have grown, so has the volumes of traffic transiting these networks."


NFR has major customers among Fortune 500 companies, financial institutions and government, military and intelligence agencies.